Kentucky receipt book

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The Kentucky Receipt Book is a substantial early twentieth century American household cookbook attributed to Mary Harris Frazer, first published in 1903. Drawing on both Kentucky domestic tradition and the more elaborate continental fashions of the era, it moves from foundational stocks and soups through fish, shellfish, meats, game, and poultry, before covering sauces, breads, vegetables, eggs, cheese, salads, pies, cakes, frozen desserts, beverages, preserves, pickles, canning, and candies. A final section folds in cereals, household hints, home remedies, and toiletry preparations. With over fifteen hundred anchored food records and only a handful of household or medicinal entries, the book is overwhelmingly a culinary reference, though its closing pages show how thoroughly cookery, home medicine, and household management were intertwined in the period. The recipes range from plain family fare like baked beans and corn bread to showpieces of formal entertaining such as boned turkey, aspic jelly, and charlotte russe, reflecting a household that cooked for both everyday meals and elaborate occasions. Readers today will find a detailed record of turn of the century Southern and continental-influenced cooking, useful as much for its technique and vocabulary as for its recipes, and valuable as a window into how an ambitious American kitchen of 1903 was actually run.

The book proceeds through a sequence of culinary categories in roughly the order a formal kitchen would need them. It opens with soup stocks and soups (sections 1 to 2), moves into fish and shellfish (sections 2 to 4), then meats, game, and poultry (sections 4 to 6), followed by sauces and breads (sections 6 to 8), vegetables and eggs (sections 8 to 10), refined preparations like souffles, aspics, and croquettes (sections 10 to 11), salads and dressings (sections 12 to 13), pies and puddings (section 13), cakes (section 16), dessert sauces and molded desserts (section 17), frozen desserts and custards (sections 18 to 19), beverages (section 19), preserves, pickles, and canning (sections 20 to 21), and finally candies, cereals, household hints, home remedies, and toiletries (section 22). Named headings such as BREAD, TOAST, VEGETABLES, and CATSUP mark major divisions, and many sections cluster recipes by ingredient, such as the extensive oyster and salad groupings.